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This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save on spring brunch with great everyday prices on bacon, organic salads, and more. Look for the yellow low-price signs and the 365 by Whole Foods Market logo. I'm WBC Chicago. It's This American Life. And I am joined in the studio by my co-worker, Emmanuel Jochi. Hey, Ira. Hey there. So I have come into the studio today with this, actually. Let me just get it out of this bag really quickly. Hang on here.

So that is like a piece of rock about the size of a football, yellow on one side. Yeah, it's a piece of concrete. So there's a story behind this, which is a couple weeks ago, I went to this one street in Washington, D.C.,

And on that street, there are like, I don't know, maybe a dozen construction workers who were using like all of this heavy machinery to like rip out the words Black Lives Matter, which had been painted on that street as part of like this big mural they'd done in 2020, you know, like right after the murder of George Floyd. Yeah, I actually saw that once. It's just a giant letters, like 50 feet tall or something, two blocks long. Yeah, it was like huge, right by the White House.

And what I was watching that day as I was there was the city just completely getting rid of it because of pressure they'd been under from the Trump administration. I thought that when I got there, that there would be crowds or protests, but it was pretty empty. Like most of the people that I saw just sort of walked past and kept it pushing, ignored what was going on.

But then I saw this one black woman sort of stop and like wave over to like one of the lone black guys working on a construction crew. Just like, you know, pointing at the ground. Sorry. Are you asking for a piece of it? Yeah.

It was a huge piece. Okay, I'll take this. Thank you. Oh my God, that's heavy. The piece she had was so big. She had to hold it with two hands. It was a piece of the letter T in the word matters. And the woman holding it, JC, she's a politico, lives in DC. She told me she was sitting at a cafe nearby when she saw someone else who had a piece. I was like, oh, I want one of those.

You just walked right up. You were just like, oh, can I? Why not? I mean, he was very kind to take a break and get me a piece. And then I didn't like the first piece that he gave me. Oh, what? I know, but I needed the yellow. I feel like the yellow was really big. Because otherwise it's just a piece of concrete. Yeah. My kids aren't going to believe me if I say it.

from Black Lives Matter Plaza and it's just a piece of concrete. Like, it needed the yellow. Oh, do you have kids right now? Oh, okay. You're talking about future kids. Future kids. I'm thinking about them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I started seeing other people who were doing this too, right? Just like grabbing these pieces of the mural for future generations that did or didn't exist. There were these two women who were in town for work. One of them was scared that they were actually going to miss their flight because her friend was waiting so long for the construction workers to break off just the right piece of the mural, like as a souvenir.

What time is your flight? I know, I'm heading out now. So, I actually lived in D.C. when they first painted this street. And I've got to say, at the time when I first saw it, I totally understood how meaningful it was to some folks. But personally...

Honestly, I just kind of rolled my eyes and laughed about it with the other black people that I knew. It just felt kind of performative. Just like one of the same with a lot of the stuff that was happening back then, right? Like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and co kneeling in Kent Daycloth in the Capitol. Yeah. All those black squares people were posting. Yeah.

But now that I was actually here, seeing them tear this message out of the ground, it just, I don't know, I was just like, oh, right. It maybe didn't matter that much when it was first put in, but it definitely mattered now that it was being taken out. Across the street, I saw this older white guy who worked in urban design. He was so excited to have a piece of the thing. I don't know. These letters are forever letters. Yeah.

It's not just concrete. It's super concrete. It's fiberglass reinforced, super concrete. So she built that to last forever. For you, why is it important for you to have a piece of it? I thought it was very divisive. I was very disappointed when the mayor did that. It was just so divisive to do that. And the rhetoric and the fighting increased after that. So you're getting a piece of it kind of as a memento of a thing that you didn't like? I think it's healing. Getting rid of it is kind of a healing situation. Okay, so talking to this guy.

It hit me, he's here to mark the end of something, which I realized, oh, we all were, right? Like, I think it was clear to absolutely everybody there on that street that one era has ended and, like, we're in some very new moment right now. And lots of us were just trying to puzzle that out in real time, like, what this means. Like, there were these two women that I met, Soraya and Yasmeen. Soraya was on the fence about taking a piece at all. She was just sort of like...

Why would I want a piece of something that never felt real? But it's not felt. Black lives matter. We don't matter. Oh, interesting. We don't matter. It's like you're taking it away. It sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is this thing, sorry, sorry, sorry. There is this thing I've been thinking about, though, which is like, is this more honest, actually, that they actually are ripping this up? Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. This is America showing itself because it was never in you in the first place.

So why am I upset that you're upending something that was never in you in the first place? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upset. We definitely should be upset. But why are we... We can't be upset at people that it was never in them in the first place to even care about somebody else. So as I was leaving the street that day, I just felt like, oh, right, the America that I know, like the one I grew up in,

it leaves for sign up, right? Like it says it believes in all of this stuff, you know, that all of us are equal, that, you know, we all want to live in racial harmony, whatever. And then it just kind of does what it wants. But like what I saw, like the government going to these great lengths to tear up this street and to get every shred of the letters out, like not even bothering to pay lip service anymore.

I was like, that feels like a real shift. So yeah, that's how I ended up with this piece of concrete, which I guess is just gonna live in my house forever. It's like you have a piece of the Berlin Wall or something. You know what? It does feel like that. Like it feels like this thing that I want to show everybody in my life. It's like it's a part of my own personal museum. Yes, a museum.

One of the things that, you know, we've been talking about here on the staff, as you know, is it feels like there are so many things happening every day since President Trump took office, like federal agencies being gutted or, you know, a judge ordering the White House to turn some planes around and then...

seeming to ignore the court order or secret war planning being done on signal on people's phones and shared with a random reporter. There was so much happening so fast and you feel like, oh, did that really happen? And I don't know, with our staff, we've been talking about how we just want to grab a hold of these things and just put them in a place where we can look at them together, just preserve them.

like a museum, a museum of now. I mean, this feels rude to say on the radio, but I'm going to say it, which is, you know that I'm not going to give you this for your museum, right? This is mine. Fine. Because today on our show, we have other historical artifacts of this exact moment we are living through. As you'll hear, the people in these stories over and over, they seem sort of dumbfounded at what they're suddenly seeing and dealing with in America today. We were too. Stay with us.

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To get $100 towards your first bed purchase, go to thuma.co slash NPR. It's It's American Life, today's show, the Museum of Now. And let's take a little stroll, shall we, through the museum? Watch out for the construction right there. There's some stuff. Yeah, we're just starting to build out our collection here. All right, let's begin with this exhibit, a multimedia exhibit. This is actually the hold music that people all over the country are hearing when they try to reach the Social Security Administration.

The agency sends out payments to some 70 million people every month. The agency says that it is getting way more calls than usual right now. Elon Musk and all the talk of rooting out fraud and kicking dead people off of the rolls seem to be freaking out millions of senior citizens. So more of them are calling. Audits, by the way, show that lots of dead people are not getting checks. That is not a thing. Wait times so long even before this.

But right now, a fourth of the callers basically get a busy signal and have to try again. If you call and you do get put on hold, there is a callback option. One of our co-workers decided to stay on the line to see how long it would take. Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience. The estimated hold time is 60 minutes. Yeah, there's nowhere close to that.

They finally picked up at 1 hour 39 minutes. The worker who did finally pick up the phone, I will say, was super nice and very helpful. Of course, you're welcome. Is there anything else that I could do for you at all today? That's all. All right, ma'am. Well, then you have a great rest of your day, okay? Hello. At Social Security, your satisfaction means the world to us. Okay, next, walk with me down the hallway here to this next exhibit. Okay, stop right there. Here we have a short video.

As you can see, it's playing on a loop. It was posted on X by the Secretary of Homeland Security. Eight seconds long, security cam footage, plays over and over. And to help you understand what you're looking at, Aviva de Kornfeld has the story of the five days that led to this video for the woman who was in it. What happened in those five days caught this woman completely off guard because as far as she knew, or as we know now, what happened to her hadn't happened to anybody else at that point.

just three weeks ago. Day one, Thursday, 8 a.m. Ranjini Srinivasan is not a morning person. She likes to start the day slowly, scroll on her phone in bed. She gets lots of panicked emails from her students. She's a teaching assistant. She's also a graduate student at Columbia University. So, day one, she was in bed when she saw an email. Subject line, visa revocation notification. But the wording in the email was weird.

It said she may be ineligible for her student visa, but also that it had been revoked. It seems spammy. Just because, you know, Columbia sometimes does phishing trainings, so I actually thought that this might be one of those. It just seemed so strange. I took a screenshot and actually put it in our...

What did people respond? Ranjani thought, hmm, okay, this seems to be real. But she's lived here a long time, nine years, and she's had a lot of visas. Things happen sometimes.

So she emails the International Students and Scholars Office. They've helped her out with visa stuff before. And also the Dean of Student Affairs, asks for help straightening this out. Then she grabs her stuff and heads to the office she shares with the other PhDs, where she spends most of her time, to get some grading done. She had 60 student sketchbooks she needed to get through before Monday.

That evening, she hears back from the International Students Office, who CCs the Dean of Student Affairs, and tells her, Don't worry, this sometimes happens. Just book an online advising session through our system and just don't leave the country. Otherwise, you are in legal status. You can, you know, go to work. You can grade your students' work, stuff like that.

And that was one of the big questions in my head, right? So I was sort of going back and forth during the time waiting for her reply, thinking whether I should be grading or should I not be grading. Oh, so you were trying to distract yourself by grading papers, but then you're like, is this breaking the law itself? Yes, exactly. But it wasn't. So I was told in writing that

I was allowed to, you know, just go about my normal life. I don't need to worry. This is all being treated as very run-of-the-mill. And the tone from Columbia is that this happens to many students. It's not, you know, a rare thing. They tell her the next available appointment is in five days. Five days felt like too long to wait.

The college was telling her that this would all get sorted out easily. But Ranjini has always been fastidious about her paperwork. She has an encrypted folder on her computer for all things visa-related. She's been in the U.S. since 2016 and knows almost all her entry and exit dates off the top of her head. She doesn't like loose ends, and she didn't like the idea of waiting five days. So she gets them to change the appointment to the next day.

Ranjani is from Chennai in the south of India. In 2016, she was awarded a Fulbright to get a master's in design at Harvard. She was very excited to go to an American university.

The U.S. scholarship is really robust. You know, there's a great intellectual culture of inquiry. A lot of the people I had read or like my intellectual heroes went to many of these universities. You know, David Harvey, he's an economic geographer. And, you know, Ambedkar, who is the architect of the Indian Constitution, actually studied at Columbia University.

So I was super excited to, you know, kind of see the U.S. and like take part in this like culture of inquiry. She graduated with a master's from Harvard and then followed her intellectual hero to Columbia to get a Ph.D. in urban planning.

Her work focuses on the way that urbanization impacts the labor force. She often went back to India to do fieldwork. But she's settled happily in her life on campus. She's made lots of friends, including her roommate, another PhD student. The university randomly paired them together years ago, and they've since become close. Every year, the two of them take a family portrait with Ranjani's cat, Cricket, and send it around as a Christmas card. Day two, Friday, 10.30 a.m.,

Ranjani's in her bedroom. She opts on a Zoom call for her appointment with the International Students Office advisor and starts explaining the situation with a weird email. Meanwhile, Ranjani's roommate is in the other room, braiding her hair, getting ready for the day. Here's her roommate. To protect her privacy, we're not naming her. And suddenly I hear this bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, which, you know, it's that particular tone. It's a scary knock.

Um, and so I step up and, you know, again, half of my hair is unbraided, half of it's braided. The cat's confused. I'm confused. I go to the door and I go, who is it? Someone yells back, police! Police!

And I go, OK, well, my heart's beating fast. And I just know that I don't want to open the door because one, anyone can yell police to I'm in my bathrobe. And so, you know, any kind of armed men is not walking into my apartment right now.

Ranjani, in her bedroom. She doesn't hear the knock. She couldn't hear it over the reassurances from the advisor from the International Students Office. They're basically saying stuff like, don't worry, this sometimes happens. So then I clarify that I can actually grade my students' work, which is forefront in my mind right now. The scary knocker knocks again.

Ranjani's roommate told me she's a citizen and a woman of color who grew up poor, who's had a lot of interactions with the police, none of which she would describe as positive. But she knows what to do. She calls from inside the apartment. What is this about?

They start reeling off information about Ranjani in a very sort of like good cop kind of way. They're like, oh, we know that your visa was canceled. We're the only people you can turn to. We really we just want to talk to you. We just have some questions. And I'm sort of there just like, who's we?

And I can't see through, I can't see anyone through my peephole. And so the voice starts talking about really intimate details of Ranjani's visa and immigration status. And I stop him and I go, wait, do you have a warrant? He doesn't respond to that. And I sort of just keep asking, what is this about? She goes to tell Ranjani what's happening.

I guess I wasn't paying attention to the door. I was just focused on the Zoom conversation. So sometime midway through the conversation, through the door, she turns and tells me, ICE is at the door. What do you think when you hear that? I'm freaking out. Just freaking out. I just start shivering and shaking because...

My I'm still on Zoom with my advisor who till the last second was saying, you're fine, you can go out and teach your students. But I tell the advisor that ICE is at my door. Tell me what to do. And you can see the advisor's eyes kind of become wide. She says, OK, just give me a second. She mutes herself and she's frantically talking to people like higher ups.

The advisor eventually unmutes, looking relaxed again. And she tells Ranjani that she's safe. Just don't open the door for ICE. And then she gives her a list of immigration lawyers to contact. And I was like, won't Columbia, you know, have a lawyer? Won't they, like, you know,

be negotiating with ICE on my behalf? Like, why am I on my own? And she's like, oh, that's not like something that happens. You shouldn't have any issues. And then I just told her that, you know, I don't really trust Colombia at this point. And then she says, oh, but do you trust me? What'd you say? I mean, I just told her I don't know you. What'd she say to that?

She just was like, "Just call the lawyers and don't open the door." They don't open the door. And the ICE officers eventually leave. Ranjini has had enough experience as an immigrant in this country to know that ICE is not supposed to show up at your door a day after your visa is revoked. This is not the way things typically work. How it normally goes: You're granted a student visa. And the visa is the thing that allows you to enter the country.

And once you're here, if you're a student, you can legally stay as long as you're enrolled in school, even if your visa is revoked. But if you stop attending school, then you have to leave the country. This is what Ranjani was turning over in her head with ICE at the door. She still had her status as a student. She was still enrolled at Columbia. The advisor woman from Columbia on Zoom was telling her there should be no issue. But there was one at her door.

Ranjani thought, I have to get out of here. I need to hide. I'm absolutely paralyzed with fear. I'm not able to think straight. I just thought that if I go somewhere else for a bit, I will feel a little safer and things will hopefully blow over. I mean, I fully intended to return to my apartment.

So, you know, I literally just take like a couple of pairs of clothes and a shower gel and a loofah. So that's all I literally had on me. Wow, the loofah made the cut. Yeah. Well, you know, you need something to keep your spirits up. Ranjani moves to her friend's apartment. She and her roommate decide that it's safer if her roommate doesn't know where she's going. So that should ice come back, she can truthfully say she doesn't know where Ranjani is.

But a few of Ranjani's other friends gather at the new location, and everyone starts calling immigration lawyers to try and figure out what to do.

Meanwhile, the dean of student affairs, who Ranjini first reached out to when she got this suspicious email from the consulate, calls her and says, Oh, I heard about ICE coming to your door. I'm so sorry. Let me know if I can do anything for you. And then I basically tell her, I'm really scared. Why are they here? I don't understand. Can you please like talk to ISSO, the International Students Office, please?

And then they sort of tell me, oh, I will do that. But it seems that, you know, even the International Students Office or Columbia, nobody seems to be in control. Wow. Yeah. I'm still calling lawyers. You know, I'm going through all my legal options. Again, we don't know why this is happening, right? Because I'm still in legal status. It's just my visa that's been revoked. So under any circumstance, I legally can be in the country. I can legally be working legally.

Everything is fine. Because the way it works is that the visa is, you know, just like a key to let you in and out. But your legal status is like a rental agreement of your house. You know, you have the right to be there even if you lose the key. She racks her brain for mistakes she might have made. Looks back through all her immigration records. But she can't find anything. Day three. Saturday, 6.20 p.m.

Ranjani is at her friend's place when her roommate calls her. She tells Ranjani ICE came back to the apartment. They didn't have a warrant, but they talked through the door. Her roommate recorded it. Hey, Ranjani, if this is you, listen, you don't have to answer any questions, okay? But let me just speak. We were here yesterday. We're here today. We're going to be here tonight, tomorrow. You're probably scared. If you are, I get it. We're not. The reality is your visa was revoked.

Okay? You are now amenable to removal proceedings. Ranjani realizes the situation is not going to go away. The email was not spam. Ice showing up at her apartment, not a fluke. She was being targeted. She'd never heard of this happening to anyone else. The rules, how things normally work, that was changing. But she didn't know it yet.

And then, the same night her roommate tells her that Ice came back, Ice showed up at the apartment of another student, a Columbia graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, who had just finished his degree in December. Mahmoud was coming home with his wife that night and locking his apartment door when Ice appeared and detained him, took him away to a detention center in Louisiana. Mahmoud has a green card. His wife, Noor, is a citizen.

I remember reading about it in the paper, you know, and I was extremely scared if my flatmate had not been there.

That would have been me. Again, I have no stranger danger. I would have just opened the door and they would have detained me. I think the idea of Mahmood's being in Louisiana and not able to speak to his lawyers scared me greatly. It was beyond my imagination. I mean, during this entire experience, I just felt that this was sort of a disembodied view of what was happening. It didn't seem real that this could happen to any of us.

It felt fever dreamish. Yeah, no. And I was, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I was, you know, shaking all the time. And most of my friends will tell you I'm a very calm person. I'm really good in a crisis. But this was just unprecedented, an unprecedented situation. You know, everything that's happened has been outside the realm of possibility in my head. So, yeah.

Ranjani did not know Mahmoud Khalil. She learned he was a leader of the pro-Palestine protests after he'd been detained. And here, a new thought occurs to her. She had liked some pro-Palestine posts on social media. She'd also signed a few open letters and gone to a couple peaceful protests.

And one night, coming home from a PhD picnic, she says she accidentally ran into a big protest on campus. It was chaotic. She says she got swept up by police officers, along with a bunch of other people. She received two summonses for blocking a sidewalk and refusing to disperse, but they were both dismissed. And now, Ranjini wondered, is that what all this is about? It seemed impossible she'd be targeted so personally for that.

But what just happened to Mahmoud Khalil, that seemed impossible too. Day four, Sunday, 5 p.m. Ranjani gets an email from Colombia saying that the Department of Homeland Security had now terminated her legal status and the university was disenrolling her. She was no longer a student.

no longer a teaching assistant. I lost my legal status. I lost my worker status. And I also lost my housing. So I was really unhappy. And then when I got this email, actually the dean of student affairs in my school came into my building and was ringing the doorbell, trying to find out whether I'd received the email telling me to vacate and getting a confirmation that I've received the email and I'm going to leave the apartment.

So at that point, I knew Columbia was either complicit or working with law enforcement. I just felt completely betrayed because I don't have a discipline record. I have like a perfect GPA, like I haven't done anything. And the fact that I just felt like a sacrifice almost, it just feels like the institution doesn't really care.

Columbia University wouldn't speak to Ranjani's case in particular, but they sent us a statement that says the university follows the law and, quote, takes great care to ensure our legal compliance with all applicable rules and obligations so that our students can participate in the federal student and exchange visitor program. Day five. Ranjani's lawyers told her she could fight this, but she'd likely be detained for some amount of time. No idea how long.

Though, as it would be a federal case, it would probably be at least a year while it wound its way through the courts. The only way to avoid detention, her lawyers told her, was voluntary departure. Ranjini thought, "I have some friends and relatives in Canada. That's close by." It was quite a quick decision. I bought my plane ticket on Tuesday and I left on Tuesday.

I think just the idea of detention, you know, at some level I was like, is even a PhD worth spending several years in jail or we don't know how long, we don't know what charges. There's so many unknowns. My lawyers kept telling me all this is unprecedented territory and I just thought the risks were too high.

I don't know. I just spent so many days in panic. Yeah. And I just... I'm extremely, extremely fearful of detention. I'm very claustrophobic. And I don't think I would have been able to survive in a cell for, like, years or... I don't even know how long this is going to take, right? So there are just too many unknowns. Also, the likelihood of winning these lawsuits is also not that high was also what I gathered. So...

How American. Those fears Ranjini had about what might have happened if she'd stayed

Well, two days after she left, at 9.40 p.m. I again get the knock, but the knock doesn't stop. This is Ranjani's roommate again. She grabs her phone to start recording. Whereas before it was maybe 20 seconds of knocking, this time it's just knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, in that same aggressive, sort of authoritative way for probably three minutes. This time, it's also different because they have campus safety with them, the Columbia Campus Police.

So someone calls through the door, "Hey, you've got to open the door." And I hear a key in my lock. And at that point, I hop up. I am in full sort of defend my home mode. They go, "It's the police. We're coming in. We have a warrant." And they're opening the door. All I hear is, "Hands up! Hands up!" Police, let me see your hands. Let me see your hands. Hands are up. Hands are up. Okay, turn around. Where's your location?

I don't understand the question. Where do you reside in this apartment? I reside in the door on the right. Door on the right? Okay, go over there. I have a cat in the living room. Please do not touch her. Okay, do you want to bring her in your room? Yes, I would. Okay, go right ahead. And what is your name? Is your roommate here? No one is here except for me and my cat. What is your name? Can you please get that? We can talk at the end. Okay.

My cat's terrified on the couch. I grab her up. She's freaking out as cats do.

Come here, come here, sweetie. Come here, sweetie. There's a guy in a shirt and a bulletproof vest clearing through the doors. He's opening bang, opening bang, opening bang doors, going through everything, opening the closets, opening, you know, all of the stuff. The ICE officers are all wearing masks with their comically large bulletproof vests. The campus safety guy in his Columbia University lanyard is just kind of standing around.

If there is any question of Columbia working with ICE, it seems like it's answered here. Eventually, they all leave. Here's the warrant. Here's the return saying we didn't take anything. And where's the judge signature? U.S. Magistrate Judge. Okay. There you go. Thank you. Have a nice day. I will not say the same for you. Ranjani has been in Canada for just over two weeks now.

Columbia still hasn't reached out since ICE raided her apartment. She has no idea whether she'll be able to finish the degree she was a few months from completing, the degree she's worked towards for the better part of a decade. And Ranjani is only now starting to get some information about what the government says she did wrong. The Department of Homeland Security has said that she failed to disclose the two summonses she received last spring when she applied to renew her visa. Ranjani says that was a mistake and that she's not going to be able to finish the degree.

She didn't think to include them because they'd been dismissed. And even though she's left the country, the government has not let up. She was eating lunch the other day when she got a message from her union rep saying, "There's a video of you circulating online," tweeted out by the head of DHS, Kristi Noem. This is the video I thought was worthy of adding to our museum of now: eight seconds of grainy security footage from LaGuardia Airport.

In it, Ranjani is kind of jog-walking through the airport, pulling her carry-on bag behind her. Alongside the video, Kristi Noem wrote, She celebrated Ranjani's, quote-unquote, self-deportation.

As if running to safety was some kind of admission of guilt. Yeah, I was sort of shocked seeing it on Twitter because I actually didn't know who Kristi Noem was also. So I didn't really know what was the context of this video. You're like, why is this random lady tweeting a video of me? A little bit, yes.

What was it like for you to watch the video? Oh, I was like, why am I walking so funny? I guess that was the first reaction mentally, but yeah.

You are kind of rushing in the video. Yeah, so basically what happened was I was really hungry and I stopped for a bite and I kind of lost track of time. I thought I was late for the flight. It's like the perfect five-second snapshot to be like, look, she's running away. But actually, the reason you're walking quickly is utterly mundane. Yeah, I mean, you see such people every day in airports, right? So for her to sort of tweet this, it seemed a little strange.

The day DHS released the video, they also put out a press release saying that Ranjani was involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization. Ranjani says that's absurd, that she never advocated for violence in any form, and that she was engaged in peaceful protest. I reached out to DHS. They didn't respond to our questions.

Ranjani has been personally targeted by one of the world's superpowers, a fact that feels so preposterous and surreal, it's impossible for her to wrap her head around, even now. So instead, she finds that her mind keeps landing on more familiar terrain. There's an image that keeps coming back to her. It's from day one, Thursday, March 6th, the day she got that first spammy-seeming email.

I remember sitting in the PhD office and grading and like chatting with, you know, the other my other friends in there. I guess that's the thought that keeps, you know, sort of looping in my head. I'm just like, will I ever be able to do this again? Because that was the last normal thing that you'd done. Yeah, exactly. The sequence of events was just so far out the level of escalation. Like it has shaken my sense of reality completely.

Ranjani contains a kind of contradiction. She's someone who is deeply committed to the rules, and she tried to operate within those rules. Even after she left the country, she couldn't help but think, but I was in compliance. But also, some part of her sensed the rules had changed. Aviva de Kornfeld is a producer on our show. Since Ranjani got off the country, more students and faculty have been detained or deported by ICE.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked at a press conference just how many foreign students have had their visas revoked. He said at least 300. Might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa. We're looking every day. Coming up, somebody talks to a Trump administration official and holds their feet to the fire about incorrect facts that they're basing policy on in a way I just have never heard.

Not from reporters, not from other politicians, not from anybody. This visual is simply not allowed to walk away from the conversation. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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This American Life, Myra Glass. Today's program, Museum of Now. So many things around us seem to be changing so quickly since President Trump took office that it is hard to keep track. We thought it would be a good idea to create this museum where we could all, you know, pause for a minute, consider what is in front of us, what is happening, and let's just head down the hallway here, okay? Past the big map of the Gulf of America.

And then the past the pictures of President Trump on the lawn of the White House with the big red Tesla. A great product, he said, by the way, as good as it gets. OK, turn this corner. OK, stop there. Here we are. This next exhibit right in front of us is a building. See the building? Yeah. We have moved an entire federal building into the museum. The building is the Elijah Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse. And it's here because it is one of the big gladiatorial arenas of this moment in our country's history.

Tour the courtrooms in this building and you will find it is full of dozens of cases filed against the Trump administration. Cases about fired federal workers, cases about Doge and Elon Musk, cases about turning around planes full of Venezuelans, including that case where the judge ordered at least one plane to turn around midair and it didn't happen. That courtroom is in this building.

One of our show's editors, Laura Stracheski, volunteered to drop by and observe what we all assumed, I have to say, would be a weedy federal court hearing here, expecting to be bored with the minutiae of technical legal issues, really, some of the time. And instead, Laura found action, drama, comedy. Here is Laura's story. I picked a bench on the right, plaintiff's side, for my day in federal court.

The case I was there to see was about an executive order Trump signed in the very first week of his second term, barring transgender people from serving in the military. A group of transgender people were suing to block the executive order, claiming unconstitutional discrimination. Decorated, elite, upstanding, patriotic transgender service members, many of whom were there that day in court, sitting ramrod straight in the front row.

Livelihoods and honor were at stake. This was my first federal court hearing. And I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn't this. Good morning, everyone. Please be seated. Judge Ana C. Reyes. We had actors read the courtroom transcript. I wasn't allowed to record there. Before we call the case this morning, I want to address some things I saw over the weekend.

So some of you may have heard or heard about a TRO hearing I had on Friday. It got some press. There were a lot of social media posts about it, which I know because my friends kept teasing me about it all weekend by sending me a number of the posts. In that other case, a bunch of inspectors general, recently fired by President Trump, asked Judge Reyes for a temporary restraining order, a TRO, to get their jobs back. Judge Reyes did not grant the TRO.

Reyes is a Biden appointee, but clearly anybody expecting her to show knee-jerk sympathy for fired federal officials was going to be disappointed.

On X, some conservatives were praising her, but other people were mad. So I'm just going to give you a few examples. It started off pretty well. I got a voicemail in chambers which started, Judge Reyes is amazing. And look, judges are people. I appreciate the compliment. I'm not going to lie, I wanted to hear more.

So it continued, Judge Reyes is an amazing fascist who cannot read because English was her second language. And it ends with, she belongs in a house dress, not in a robe. Now look, I do not think denying a TRO makes me a fascist. Also, please be assured, counsel, that I can indeed read. I've been able to read for about a year now. She's funny, I thought.

But I'd come here to this courtroom to talk to the plaintiffs, to focus on them. That's what I thought the story was. Not this judge. Or this hearing. How did this all look to the people maybe about to lose their careers and livelihoods? The plaintiffs had over 60 years of service between them. Military careers going back generations. One called a passion and a family tradition. Another called a deep responsibility. The executive order was, quote, a devastating rebuke.

Demoralizing. If the band stood, I would lose my way of life, one of the plaintiffs said in a declaration. These were people the military had spent millions of dollars to train. Some had been in combat, won medals. Unassailable is the word that comes to mind. But the plaintiffs would sit silently through the five-plus hours of this hearing, as it turned out. Judge Reyes would be the star of the show.

In this moment, with Congress sidelined or distracted or something, it's all up to the judges, it seems, to determine if the Trump administration is following the Constitution and if not, to compel them to do so. And so I decided to watch Judge Reyes wrestle with the executive order before her. Judge Reyes is small, Latina, and just speaking for myself, intimidating.

Almost immediately, once the hearing got going, her focus fell like the eye of Sauron upon the government's lawyer, Jason Lynch. Lynch was there with two other lawyers for the Trump administration. Across the aisle from him were six lawyers on the plaintiff's side. Good morning, Your Honor. Jason Lynch, Department of Justice, Civil Division, on behalf of the United States. You guys are outmanned. Indeed we are, Your Honor. All right. Well, try to hang in there. Thank you.

Lynch, bearded, substantial in his suit, talking so fast the court reporter kept pleading with him to slow down. His job was to defend the executive order. Here's some of what it says. People with a, quote, false gender identity can't meet the standards for military service.

The order goes on to say, quote, End quote.

The implication here is that trans people are false, dishonorable, liars. I'm trans, and this kind of accusation isn't new, but I'll admit the words cut to the bone the first time I read them. And then there was this point, from an earlier executive order that this one was based on, a blockbuster titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. I don't know about you, but I'd see that movie.

Anyway, the language in that executive order, if you haven't read it, goes like this: "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality."

This was the first thing that Judge Reyes kind of drilled down on. She took it up with Lynch. Okay, and that EO states, quote, sex shall refer to an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female. EO is court speak for executive order. And it states that, quote, it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. Do you see that? Or do you remember that?

I've misplaced my defending women EO, but I will take the court's word for it. Okay, it's important, so I just want you to look at it. Okay, let me get it then. So much for being well prepared. All right, well, you guys... Lentz was standing in the well, the area in front of the judge in which, while addressing her, he must ask, even to turn his body and walk a few feet over to his desk to grab his laptop or a piece of paper with the executive order printed on it.

A lawyer friend told me that the staging of all this is important. While standing in the well, the lawyers are subject to the judge's demands and requests. The judge could be like, sit down, spin around, whatever she wants, and the lawyer would need to do it. And while everyone is in the well together, the judge limits the discussion to what is important and true.

So there is at least one magical three-dimensional space in America, sized about 300 square feet, where facts are privileged. I can tell you it's real, because I saw it myself.

You understand as a matter of biology, it's just incorrect that there are only two sexes, right? Do I understand that to be incorrect as a biological matter? Yes, it is incorrect as a biological matter. You understand that, right? I don't understand that to be incorrect. Well, you understand that not everyone has an XX or an XY chromosome, right? Well, honestly, no. I'm not prepared to... Not... I mean, it's actually kind of a really important point because this executive order is premised on an assertion that's not biologically correct.

There are anywhere near about 30 different intersex examples. So someone who does not have just an XX or XY chromosome is not just male or female. They're intersex.

And there are over 30 potential different intersex examples. We've got genetic differences. We have people with XXX chromosomes. We have androgen insensitivity, XY genetically, but may have female external sex characteristics and internally have testes. There's a 5-alpha reductase deficiency that causes changes in testosterone metabolism. She was deep in this material.

I hadn't been able to tell up until this point if Reyes was leaning in a particular direction with this case. Now I could see the things she loves. Science, rational thought, facts,

Later, in this and other hearings, there would be Star Trek references, Beyoncé, side speech on Newtonian physics. For now, homework for the lawyers. I'm happy to have you guys brief this more if you want, but I'm telling you right now that there are people who are neither male nor female, and so the premise of the executive order is just incorrect.

And my question to you is, and if you want to talk about this tomorrow, that's fine. But my question to you is, what do I do with the fact that the entire order is premised on an incorrect biological assessment? This was the first big thwack Judge Reyes took at the validity of the executive order. Lynch didn't have a satisfying answer. Judge Reyes said he had to write up a brief on the biology of sex for her.

Around this time, I looked over at a large sketch pad on the lap of an older white man sitting next to me. He was sketching with a pencil some beautifully drawn geometric shapes. Next to those were lists of numbers. Next to the numbers, one row labeled direct shots, one labeled indirect shots. Whoa. Was he keeping score? Tracking how many points the judge landed and how many Lynch did? There were percentages. How long had he been following this case?

There were layers of sophistication to observing a hearing like this that I couldn't have imagined. I asked the guy later on a break. He told me he's retired. Court watching is his hobby. Comes here to the federal court building four or five times a week just for fun. On the notepad, he was gaming out scenarios while he listened to the judge. For his other hobby, backgammon.

When an executive order gets challenged in court, there's this legal concept that gets applied, a basic test that has to pass. It's usually easy, like a limbo bar 10 feet in the air that you can just walk under. Does the order pass rational basis scrutiny? Meaning, is the government singling out this group for a legitimate reason? Is this order justified?

But with this executive order, it was hard to find a justification, because none was offered. No military officials in uniform stepped up to testify. In fact, there were no complaints at all submitted to the court from anyone in the military that trans people disrupt unit cohesion or harm troop readiness, as the order claims. No real evidence, just the naked assertion that trans people are unfit to serve.

So without convincing evidence, Judge Reyes was left with the words in the order itself and Jason Lynch standing in front of her to answer a very basic question. Is this order just demeaning and discriminatory in a common-sense way? I mean, if I called you a liar, would you find that demeaning? So I assume the court is asking in a constitutionally relevant sense whether I'm... I'm just... No, I'm asking in a common-sense way. So I don't have an answer in a common-sense way, Your Honor? Okay, you don't...

You don't know if you can tell me that categorizing an entire group of people as dishonorable, lying, undisciplined, whether at work or at home, so you can't tell me sitting here today on behalf of the government whether someone would consider that demeaning? I don't have a view to express on that question, Your Honor. Quote, a man's assertion that he is a woman and his requirement that others honor this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required for a service member. End quote.

What's the record and the evidence? What's the evidence and the record before me to support this assertion? For the same answer with the same caveats as before, Your Honor. I don't have an answer. I don't have a view to express. I can't say.

There were silver clock hands mounted up on the wood-paneled wall above Lynch's side of the courtroom. They were stuck just after 9 a.m. They never moved. And he repeated the same answers over and over and over. Would you consider being called dishonest demeaning? I think I'm going to have the same answer, Your Honor, which is that we don't concede that it's a constitutionally relevant expression. What about immodest? Same answer, Your Honor. What about lacking integrity? Can you at least give me lacking integrity?

Anyone with common sense would say that being called someone who lacks integrity, people who have sworn to take an oath, who have sworn an oath to defend the country with their lives, would you consider that to be, as a commonsensical manner, demeaning?

Or you can't even say that? I'd have to give you the same answer, Your Honor. Would it be fair to say that excluding a group of people from military service based on unsupported assertions that they are liars, immodest, lack integrity, are undisciplined, and are dishonorable, would you agree with me that particularly where there is no support for any of those assertions, that that is animated by animus?

Animus, here a legal term, meaning roughly hostility towards a specific group. Even if, say, a president doesn't like a certain category of people, the Constitution says the government can't treat them differently or worse than others without a sufficient reason.

And if there is no sufficient reason, or any discernible reason, for the executive order, the judge can conclude that it's simply discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional. I want to know whether this executive order signed by the President of the United States, who calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity—

People who have taken an oath to defend this country. People who have been under fire. People who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses animus. And I have the same answer as before, Your Honor.

Lynch seemed to be in the awkward position of not having a counter-argument, and also having no way to answer her questions without saying something that could hurt his case. Does that express animus? So, when... Yes? No? I don't know. Not in any constitutionally... No, in a common-sense way. I...

I understand, Your Honor, that as you said on Thursday, you may write an opinion that says the government refused to answer that question or was unable to answer that question. I don't have an answer for you. I almost felt bad for Lynch, but he stayed the course, kept stonewalling, which is either the perfect joke for this spot or the worst. Reyes paused, thought, tried a different tack.

You know, you're a lawyer. You know how important integrity is to your profession, right? Yes, Your Honor. All right. I made standing orders when I was in the back. My new standing orders say that no one who has graduated from UVA Law School can appear before me. So I need you to sit down, please. I need you to sit down. Lynch actually did go sit down.

He left the microphone, awkwardly circumnavigated a large table on the government side, and sat with the other two lawyers. An invisible but collective cringe rippled across the courtroom. And the reason I don't want people from UVA Law School appearing before me is because, for no reason I'm going to give you, I think they're all liars and lack integrity and are undisciplined and can't possibly meet the high rigors of being a lawyer for the government. Now,

If I actually had that standing order, would that be demeaning? Come back up to people from UVA Law School. Lynch made his way around the table again and went back up to the microphone. Because you actually prevented me from appearing in front of you on that basis, I think it would be fair if courts were subject to the same kind of scrutiny to demand that you support the reason for having done that.

This was as close as Lynch came, as far as I could tell, to conceding a point. It's fair for Judge Reyes to ask the question, to ask the government for one legitimate reason for banning transgender people from the military. Trump's Justice Department filed a complaint about Judge Reyes for this forced thought exercise about UVA Law School. They asked for an investigation, said she had tried to embarrass Jason Lynch. ♪

Judge Reyes was open to hearing a reason why trans people should not serve in the military. Indeed, she asked for one, practically pleaded. I couldn't count the times over the course of this hearing and the ones that followed that Judge Reyes asked the government lawyers to offer any evidence, any testimony, any studies, any data that would support their case for the executive order.

She gave them time. She asked for research and written briefs. Anything. Or anyone. If you want to have... If you want to get me an officer of the United States military who's willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage, the U.S. military is less prepared than it needs to be, I will be the first to give you a box of cigars. You have until...

You have 10 days to find me a person, find a declarant, anyone who's a commissioned officer, to get on the stand and say that. And I'm going to want them on the stand, not just in writing, all right? The government never produced any witnesses. No military person took the stand to argue for the executive order. Judge Reyes took a few weeks to rule.

Meanwhile, an official policy came down from the Department of Defense. The policy instructed the military to identify trans people within 30 days and required them to either leave on their own or be forced out.

So across the military, trans people started to get singled out by their commanders. First slowly, in dribs and drabs, and then faster, as more and more got scooped up and sidelined in different ways. One plaintiff told me she had been yanked from her unit as a medic in a combat zone in the Middle East and put on a plane back to the U.S. so the Army could start the process of discharging her.

Another, a congressional fellow in the Air Force serving at the Pentagon, was put on administrative leave and told to prepare to be separated. That's the military term for kicked out. A petty officer showed up for surgery at a Navy medical center in Virginia. He was pulled off a gurney after being given anesthesia, but before the surgeon began the procedure, and told to leave the hospital. ♪♪

When Judge Reyes finally ruled, she wrote that she was blocking the military policy. She found that the policy and the executive order that it was based on violated equal protection rights in the Constitution.

She wrote, "The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning. Its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact." Her ruling said the military could not discharge transgender people just for being trans, and they have to bring anyone who's been put on leave back to active duty. This week, the Trump administration appealed the case to a higher court.

As I finish this story, it's unclear whether the military will be allowed to discharge transgender service members or whether Judge Reyes' ruling will stand. If you'll permit me one small digression at this late stage. Back in the courtroom, during the hearings, there was one other court watcher. An even older man, with jeans drooping off his skinny butt. Dedicated, clearly irregular, not always coherent.

At one point, apropos of nothing, he called out into the courtroom referencing Brer Rabbit. They threw me into that briar patch, he said. Nothing worse than being thrown into a briar patch on a nice, warm, spring-like day.

I think it's fair to say that Trump's executive order, with its almost absurdly strong and cruel language, threw a lot of people into the briar patch. Plaintiffs first and foremost. Their families. Other trans service members. Lawyers. Judges. Me. It started a chain of events, and we might still be at the beginning. This case could take a while to wind its way through the courts. Months. Maybe years.

making this the kind of situation that's apparently a little too easy to get into and very, very difficult to get out of. Laura Starczewski is one of the editors of our show. The actors were Veronica Cruz and Dave Chilansky. I said I loved a lot, a lot. Hang with push and shove. Possession is passion. Damnation looks like we are...

Well, our visit to the Museum of Now was produced and edited by Nancy Updike and Rana Jafi-Wald. They also sit on the museum's board and construction committee and say that if we need to visit again, they can pull some strings for us. They promise they're going to stay on the board, even if the president decides to make himself the chairman.

Special thanks today to Eli Hagar, Tom Cartwright, Molly Mitchell, Liz Goss, Adam Cohn, Catherine Bettis, Alex Guerrero, Sonia West, Kat,

No last name. You know who you are. Andrew Zitzer, Yo-Ai Shaw, Karen Ortiz, Annika Barber, and public radio station KCRW in Los Angeles, where I've been recording this week. They have been so nice. Special thanks to Philip Richards, Sarah Sweeney, and Jennifer Farrow. Quick program note. We've been making these bonus episodes every two weeks for months now for our life partners. In the most recent one, a former producer named Alex Bloomberg begins a little tour of This American Life stories to cover the news stuff online.

I have to say there's like this weird time capsule of all kinds of feelings and events. If you want to hear those or hear the many, many non-news, very fun bonus episodes that we've made, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks to the show program's co-founder, Ms. Tori Malatia. You know, that man loves his prop comedy. Like, I don't know.

He'll take a red cape and Clark Kent glasses, put them on a slab of sidewalk, and proudly say, It's not just concrete. It's super concrete. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. Try to make it real.

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